Today we’re going to look at ways you can get more people to share your website by their own will. Word-of-mouth promotion is a very powerful tool as it allows people to do the marketing for you, even when you’re not there. Recommendations from people close to you are much more powerful then you telling people how great you are. So wherever possible, you want to encourage peer to peer sharing of your music.

While you can’t make someone talk about you, below are three things you can do to encourage social sharing of your site. All are reasonably quick and easy to implement, so give them a go.

1. ADD SOCIAL SHARING BUTTONS TO ALL OF YOUR PAGES

This is one of the biggest. It’s the easiest thing you can do to encourage page shares. Sometimes fans may come to your site and really enjoy the song or video they see. But then they leave. Without you giving them some type of clue, they wont naturally think to share your page with others. If however, you have social sharing buttons on your site, and people can see that 5 others have already ‘liked’ it on Facebook and 10 others have shared this page on Twitter, it’ll be obvious that this is something they can also do. And a percentage of people will go on to share your page as well.

By having social sharing buttons like the ones at the top and bottom of this post, you WILL increase the number of people who share your sites on social networks. Make it as easy as possible for people to share your site. If you want them to spread the word about you, these buttons will make it as easy as ‘click and go’.

How to add Social Networking Buttons

So, how do you add these buttons I hear you ask? Well if you’ve built your website on WordPress, there are plenty of social sharing plugins you can use. These are just as easy to add and configure as any other WordPress plugin; so if you’ve been using WordPress for a while, this should be pretty easy to set up. Grassrootsy highly recommends the 1-click Retweet/Share/Like plug-in.

If you haven’t got WordPress however, a simple Google search for ‘Facebook share button’, ‘Twitter share button’ and the like will give you the links you need.

2. OFFER FANS AN INCENTIVE TO SHARE YOUR WEBSITE

So while social sharing buttons do encourage more shares, there will be some people who will need a bit more encouragement. Say for example, a “free” track. I put free in quotations because we’re not actually going to be giving them that track 100% free. If they want it, they’ll have to do something for us- like spread the word about us on Facebook or Twitter, for example.

This is where tools such as Tweet For A Track come in handy. Tweet For A Track will allow you to give a song to fans, only if they first tweet whatever it is you want them to. For example, you could have people Tweet:

“Downloading *Your Name*’s song right now, can’t wait to check it out. You can downloading it here too: *insert link*” OR

“Who’s heard of *Your Name*? Just downloading some of their tracks from *Your Website*, some good quality stuff up there!”

For best results, make the tweet sound less like an advertisement and more like the average person’s opinion.

This method is win – win for everyone; Your site visitors get a free extra track, you get people tweeting or talking about you on Facebook, and everyone else get’s to discover your great music. Nice.

3. INCLUDE A CALL TO ACTION

Ok, so this point is pretty similar tosomething I mentioned earlier in Part 1 of this guide. Ask people to share your posts! Ask them to share your video pages, your download pages, and anything else you want them to share.

While the social share buttons will go a long way towards getting more shares, simply putting a written Call To Action on your site will increase the number of shares. You can add this Call To Action within your posts, in your sidebar, at the bottom of your emails, or wherever you like.

While you don’t want to over-do it, you do want to place Call to Actions in any key places on your website

CONCLUSION

So there you have it: 3 ways you can encourage more word of mouth promotion on your music site. All are easy to set up and will help encourage people to spread the word about you without any additional effort on your part. Give it a go.

that’s it for this series. If you haven’t already done so, I suggest you check out the first 2 parts of this guide and implement all that you have learned. All tips lead to a better conversions and this will mean more fans and sales for you.

If you want more tips and advice for your music career, you may want to check out my sites Music Industry How To and Music Marketing World. Both give marketing and music business advice, and combined with the guides on Grassrootsy, should give your music career the best chance possible. If you want to take your music career to the next level as fast as possible, you may also want to check out my advanced music marketing course. Until next time.